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The Department of Justice (DOJ) is asking a federal judge to pause all briefings related to a motion filed by House Democrats in an ongoing ObamaCare lawsuit, saying they cannot complete their work properly due to the government shutdown. Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said DOJ lawyers “are unable to prepare their opposition at this time due to the lapse in appropriations.” The motion was filed on Friday but appeared in the docket on Monday. (Weixel, 1/7)

Rachel Martin talks to Kerry Hawk-Lessard of Native American Lifelines, who explains how her group will run out of money to pay for health services, if the government shutdown persists. (Martin, 1/8)

Hospitals, clinics and all services provided to veterans in Oregon and southwest Washington aren’t affected by the government shutdown. We are funded on a two-year-cycle,” said Dan Herrigstad, public affairs spokesman for Portland’s VA Health Care System. “That prevents us from getting shut down because of yearly funding issues. Even when there is a complete shutdown, the VA is always open for care and all employees continue to be paid." (Hallman, 1/7)

More than 4 in 5 Democrats want Congress to enact a taxpayer-funded, national health care plan such as Medicare for All, according to a new Harvard/POLITICO poll gauging the public’s health and education priorities for 2019. Some 42 percent of Democratic respondents to the poll supported repealing and replacing Obamacare — mostly in the interest of building on the health law's coverage gains and creating a new system so that more Americans have health insurance. (Roubein, 1/7)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday that he will seek to codify Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision recognizing a constitutional right to terminate pregnancy, into the state’s Constitution. The pledge, which would take years to complete and involve a ballot measure, was made during a press conference in Manhattan at Barnard College, where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined Mr. Cuomo to lend support to his initiatives. (West, 1/7)

Mr. Cuomo’s vow was not exactly new. But the pageantry of the occasion seemed to reflect the circumstances that had prompted it: a Legislature newly controlled by Democrats raring to broaden reproductive rights, and a federal government increasingly looking to rein them in, all against the backdrop of a state with abortion laws that are not as liberal as many perceive them to be. “The Republican Senate said, ‘You don’t need a state law codifying Roe v. Wade. No administration would ever roll back Roe v. Wade,’” Mr. Cuomo said at the event at Barnard College, describing why previous efforts had languished for so long. “So help me God, this was the conversation.” (Wang, 1/7)

Cuomo is also proposing the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act, which would improve access to birth control. Cuomo vowed not to sign a state budget this spring if the two pieces of legislation aren't first approved by state lawmakers. The governor added that he wants to "take it a step further" and pass a constitutional amendment that would write a provision into the constitution "protecting a woman's right to control her own reproductive health." (Burke, 1/7)

A bill to create a Medicare for all-styled system for New York would be one of the most expensive items the Legislature could take up this year. It has passed the Assembly several times, and Senate Democrats have pledged their support, too. The idea has high-profile backers including the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson. So it should fly through, right? Not exactly. (Wang, 1/8)

The chief executive of the corporation that runs a private nursing home in Arizona where a woman in a vegetative state was sexually assaulted and later gave birth to a child resigned on Monday, the company said in a statement. The company, Hacienda HealthCare, said the resignation of the executive, Bill Timmons, was unanimously accepted by its board of directors. David Leibowitz, a company spokesman, said Mr. Timmons had been chief executive for 28 years. Efforts to reach Mr. Timmons on Monday night were unsuccessful. (Stack, 1/7)

Hacienda “will accept nothing less than a full accounting of this absolutely horrifying situation, an unprecedented case that has devastated everyone involved, from the victim and her family to Hacienda staff at every level of our organization,” Gary Orman, a member of Hacienda’s board of directors, said in the statement. No one has been arrested in connection with the incident, and it’s unclear whether police have identified any suspects. In Arizona, sexually assaulting a vulnerable adult is a felony. (Wootson, 1/7)

The Arizona Department of Health Services on Friday confirmed that the patient who gave birth was a resident at Hacienda de Los Angeles, 1402 E. South Mountain Ave. State licensing records describe the facility as a 60-bed intermediate care facility for people with intellectual disabilities. (Innes, 1/7)

Price transparency stumbled out of the gate last week as hospitals complied with a new CMS requirement to publish their lengthy list of retail charges for individual services and diagnosis-related groups in online spreadsheets by the first of the year. Some hospitals, such Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, posted a link to their charges right on their home pages. Most others, such as HCA's Aventura Hospital, posted the data deeper inside their websites, requiring a search and multiple clicks. One system, MedStar, said it won't post the information until next week because it's still working to ensure accuracy and clarity. (Meyer, 1/7)

Americans are spending more than twice as much for health care than people in other developed countries and more than double what they used to spend, a new batch of figures from the Johns Hopkins University shows. Despite efforts to curb costs, the amount spent per person in the United States was $9,892 in 2016, 117 percent more than the tally in 2000 when researchers at Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health first collected such spending data. (Cohn, 1/7)

A lot of us — probably most of us — will end up in an emergency room at some point in our lives. But what's less certain is exactly how much that ER visit is going to cost us. Vox senior policy correspondent Sarah Kliff took a deep dive into ER billing, then she wrote about it on Twitter. (McHenry, 1/7)

Republican leaders of the state Legislature signaled Monday they could again face hurdles passing legislation aimed at protecting health coverage for pre-existing conditions. Wisconsin lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly failed to find common ground last year on legislation intended to provide assurances if a lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act is ultimately successful. (Beck and Marley, 1/7)

The outgoing governor’s two terms nearly dovetailed with the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the federal health care law that expanded insurance coverage to millions of Americans and boosted federal funds for health care programs. Connecticut’s early decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare to more than 200,000 poor adults has had a positive effect on that population’s health, the state’s uninsured rate, and the program’s per-person costs. (Shanahan, 1/8)

The elimination of the Affordable Care Act tax penalty on people who don’t have health insurance could roll back recent coverage gains for Hispanics, young people, the healthy and the poor, according to a new study. The study, published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, stems from a 2017 survey in which researchers at Harvard University Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital asked more than 3,000 Californians who had bought individual health care plans: “Would you have purchased health insurance coverage this year if there was no penalty?” (Feder Ostrov, 1/7)

Jose Carlos Laviena emptied his pockets, took off his shoes and waited to die. He had just injected himself with a new type of heroin that his dealer was promoting, but the high was so strong that Laviena thought he had overdosed. The 35-year-old was preparing his body for how he wanted to be found. (Coto, 1/7)

Just under a year after Gov. Tom Wolf declared an emergency over Pennsylvania’s opioid epidemic, state officials on Monday highlighted programs they say have been touted as national models, while acknowledging there’s much work to be done to address one of the worst overdose crises in the country. The state has gotten more people into treatment, they said, and lowered a key barrier that has long kept people with addiction from medication-assisted treatment, the “gold standard” of addiction treatment. (Whelan, 1/7)

A 2018 state law requires roughly 80 hospitals and satellite emergency rooms to offer patients addicted to opioids a medication to help treat their disease. A handful do. For most, this is a new frontier. (Bebinger, 1/7)

Some people’s faces — or even just a photo of them — hint at the genes they carry. And now, an algorithm can predict not only whether they carry a genetic mutation, but which genes were mutated. The study, published Monday in Nature Medicine, is the latest from a Boston-based company called FDNA, one of a few organizations creating software that can help physicians diagnose genetic syndromes based just on a face — and may serve an important validation of the company’s technology, said Yaron Gurovich, the company’s chief technology officer. (Sheridan, 1/7)

When Sarah Ford, 14 years old, was struggling with depression, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts last spring, her pediatrician in Springfield, Mo., was able to call in help from afar. Through a live videoconference link with Mercy Virtual, a telemedicine center three hours away, a child-psychiatry expert evaluated Sarah, prescribed a medication and set follow-up appointments. With a rising number of teens and adolescents suffering from depression and anxiety, and too few professionals to help, remote video consults are helping pediatricians fill the gap in some communities. (Landro, 1/7)

Samsung Electronics Co. showed off robots at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas, including one for retail stores and another in the health-care space. The Bot Care can measure blood pressure and heart rate, detect falls and administer medicine, the South Korean technology giant said. It’s designed for in-home use. Bot Retail communicates with consumers in stores, while the Bot Air robot detects air quality. Samsung didn’t say when it intends to release the robots or how they would be priced. (Gurman, 1/7)

They are patients with diseases that mystify doctors, people whose symptoms are dismissed as psychosomatic, who have been given misdiagnosis upon misdiagnosis. They have confounded experts and have exhausted every hope save one. And so they wind up in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, a federally funded project that now includes 12 clinical centers, including one at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. (Kolata, 1/7)

The mosquito-borne virus that causes Rift Valley fever may severely injure human fetuses if contracted by mothers during pregnancy, according to new research. In a study published last month in the journal Science Advances, researchers used infected rats and human fetal tissue to discover how the virus targets the placenta. Results showed that the virus may be even more damaging to fetuses than the Zika virus, which set off a global crisis in 2015 and left thousands of babies in Central America and South America with severe birth defects. (Baumgaertner, 1/7)

You may have witnessed this scene at work, while socializing with friends or over a holiday dinner with extended family: Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot. That person might even boast about being an expert. This phenomenon has a name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology. (Fritz, 1/7)

Cigarette smoking is at an all-time low in the United States, but the benefits of this public health achievement are not being shared equally by all Americans. A new analysis of health data from the nation’s 500 largest cities shows that the people who live in neighborhoods with the highest smoking rates are more likely to be poor, less likely to be white, and more likely to have chronic heart or lung diseases. (Kaplan, 1/7)

Scientists have found a biological clue that could help explain why African-Americans appear to be more vulnerable than white Americans to Alzheimer's disease. A study of 1,255 people, both black and white, found that cerebrospinal fluid from African-Americans tended to contain lower levels of a substance associated with Alzheimer's, researchers report Monday in the journal JAMA Neurology. Yet these low levels did not seem to protect black participants from the disease. (Hamilton, 1/7)

Low fitness levels have long been tied to higher risk for heart problems. Now researchers say men’s cardiorespiratory fitness is tied to their risk for stroke, as well. Researchers in Norway followed 2,014 middle-aged men for more than 20 years. Those who were unfit for the whole study period, or who started out fit but became less so, were twice as likely to have a stroke as those who stayed fit or became fit, they reported in the International Journal of Stroke. (Crist, 1/7)

Almost 10 years ago, journalist Hillary Frank was pregnant and planning to give birth without medication or surgery — but things didn't go according to her plan. Instead, Frank experienced a prolonged and difficult labor that left her with a traumatic injury — chronic pain from an episiotomy that didn't heal as expected, and had to be redone. For months she was unable to walk, sit or easily hold or nurse her newborn daughter, and didn't fully recover for three years. To make matters worse, beyond the physical injury, she felt she couldn't talk openly about what had happened to her. (Gross, 1/7)

Every baby born in the United States is given a routine blood test to screen for dozens of inherited medical conditions. Now, the U.S. National Institutes of Health is exploring whether to use DNA sequencing to screen newborn babies for additional genetic abnormalities and disorders. Such DNA testing would likely complement, but not replace, the current routine blood tests. However, before routine genetic screening of infants even approaches reality, many questions need answers, including whether genetic sequencing can accurately identify babies who will develop a disease, according to Dr. Joseph A. Bocchini Jr., chairman of the Advisory Committee on Heritable Disorders in Newborns and Children. (Scutti, 1/7)

Kaiser Health News: Will I Always Face The Threat Of A Peanut-Laden Kiss Of Death?

Whenever I see a report touting possible new peanut allergy treatments, I devour it. I can’t help it. It’s an occupational hazard for any health journalist whose reporting specialty and medical history intertwine. I write about the business of health care, focusing on how consumers interact with the system — what we pay, what we get and why American care costs so much. But in this particular instance, I have another kind of authority: 26 years of life-threatening allergies to nuts and peanuts. (Luthra, 1/8)

Paige Harley couldn’t have guessed that the path to recovery from the end of her second marriage would lead to the South Pole. The 49-year-old mother of three from Nashville, Tenn., turned to running as a form of therapy in 2016, as she had after her first divorce. “I didn’t know who I was outside a relationship. Running set me up to learn what I could do,” says Ms. Harley, a mediator who helps families going through divorce. Then she read an article about doing a marathon on all seven continents. “It was about facing my fears. Do I like to travel? Do I like to do hard things?” (Potkewitz, 1/7)

When Carly Feinstein was in ninth grade, her dentist sent her to an orthodontist. “I cried for three hours when I heard I had to get braces,” said Carly, now 16, who lives in New York City. “I worried about how I would look. It would have been so embarrassing.” But like an increasing number of adolescents, she was delighted to learn that she did not need to get traditional metal braces after all. She was treated with clear aligners instead. (Harris, 1/8)

The New Hampshire Hospital Association is jumping into a lawsuit against the state over the boarding crisis for psychiatric patients, arguing that state officials are failing to provide timely care to patients by keeping them in emergency rooms. In a statement Monday, Steve Ahnen, president of the association, said it would be submitting an intervention in the lawsuit, first submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union in November. (DeWitt, 1/7)

State attorneys and lawyers representing reproductive rights groups argued in federal court Monday over whether a sweeping lawsuit challenging more than 60 Texas abortion regulations should move forward. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel told state attorneys that their 73-page argument confused him. He also expressed confusion about what reproductive rights groups were arguing over. (Evans, 1/7)

State hospitals have seen a near quadrupling of individuals admitted involuntarily due to a mental or behavioral health crisis over the past five years. The Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services is asking the General Assembly to approve nearly $8 million to address staffing shortages. (Balch, 1/7)

Florida has revoked the license of a nursing home where 12 elderly patients died in the heat after it lost power during a 2017 hurricane. The Agency for Health Care Administration issued its order Friday, saying an administrative law judge correctly concluded the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills "created an unsafe environment" in September 2017 after Hurricane Irma knocked out its air conditioning. (1/7)

Michigan's former drinking water regulator has pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor in the Flint water investigation. It's a break for Liane Shekter Smith, who was facing felony charges, including involuntary manslaughter, in an investigation of Flint's lead-tainted water and a Legionnaires' disease outbreak. (1/7)

Two months after launch, Emory Healthcare and Kaiser Permanente say their new collaboration is working well for both sides. Part of the evidence is in patient volume: Emory’s two “core’’ hospitals covered by the agreement are seeing many more Kaiser members. (Miller, 1/7)

A policy order introduced by Mayor Marc McGovern this month, and co-sponsored by several City Councilors, asks the City Solicitor to draft a home rule petition to send to the state legislature that would allow people to amend their birth certificates and choose “X” as a gender option. (Annear, 1/7)

Studies of California’s landmark nurse-to-patient ratios law, implemented since 2004, show that setting reasonable limits on the number of patients who can be safely cared for by a nurse improves nurse retention, reduces burnout, and improves patient outcomes. In Pennsylvania, we have state-mandated limits on the number of well children who can be cared for in child care facilities by a child care worker, yet there is no limit to the number of sick children who may be cared for by a nurse. (Maureen May, 1/7)

About six months after a new CEO took the helm of the state’s largest health insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the nonprofit confirmed that it has launched a reorganization. The company would not make Brian D. Pieninck, its president and CEO as of July, or any other executive available for an interview and would not confirm the reorganization’s effect on jobs or otherwise quantify changes. (Cohn, 1/7)

G. Ford Gilbert, founder of a chain of controversial diabetes treatment clinics, pleaded guilty in federal court to one charge of conspiring to commit bribery, according to the U.S. Attorney's office in Alabama. He had previously faced seven counts of federal health care fraud, bribery, and other charges in Alabama federal district court related to an alleged "pyramid scheme" with his network of diabetes insulin infusion clinics. The other six are to be dismissed as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. (Clark, 1/7)

Kaiser Health News: How Helping Patients Get Good Care At Home Helps Rural Hospitals Survive

Rural hospitals close when they don’t have enough paying patients to care for, but they’re also dinged when the same patients show up over and over again. That puts outlying medical facilities in the precarious position of needing to avoid repeat customers. Charlotte Potts is the type of patient some hospitals try to avoid. She lives in Livingston, Tenn. — a town of 4,000, tucked between rolling hills of the Cumberland Plateau. (Farmer, 1/8)

Some of the fastest-growing jobs in Colorado the next five years will be in health care, business operations and oil and gas, according to an international online employment website. A report by CareerBuilder says in Colorado and across the country, the demand for health care jobs — registered nurses, physicians, medical and nursing assistants, physical therapists and home health aides — will grow by 6 percent or more during the next five years. Nearly half the fastest-growing jobs in Colorado are expected to be in health care. (Kohler, 1/7)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared a new medical device invented by a Twin Cities neurosurgeon to detect signs of concussion by tracking a patient's eye movements. The device, called the EyeBox, was invented by Minnesota neurosurgeon Dr. Uzma Samadani following the discovery that slight discrepancies in how a patient's eyes track an image on a screen can reveal a wealth of information about underlying brain dysfunction. (Carlson, 1/7)

One of the architects of Florida’s medical-marijuana laws anticipates a “new day in Florida” on marijuana issues after Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis takes over Tuesday as the state’s chief executive. DeSantis, a former congressman closely tied to President Donald Trump, “is going to embrace issues of access and patient care,” according to state Senate budget chief Rob Bradley, R-Fleming Island. (Kam, 1/7)

In early 2017, I offered advice to incoming Trump administration officials on how they ought to handle health care based on lessons from the Obama administration. I suggested proceeding incrementally and continuing to expand access to care and preexisting condition protections. They didn’t listen. Instead, Donald Trump consumed much of his first year as president on an ill-conceived adventure to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a plan for anything better. At the risk of being ignored a second time, I offer members of the new Congress advice as they begin their terms. (Andy Slavitt, 1/8)

It was a pretty good year for President Obama’s major legacy, healthcare reform, aka Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. The pace of new signups has been respectable if not miraculous, and now Republicans in Congress have decided (correctly) that perhaps total war against Obamacare is not their wisest strategy. People seem to like the ACA. They especially like the provision forbidding insurers to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions. This formerly obscure technical term of the insurance business has become the center of the healthcare discussion. You can’t call it a debate, because there’s no basic disagreement. Everyone’s for covering preexisting conditions. The question is, Who got there first? (Michael Kinsley, 1/8)

We and many others have written about the dangers of surprise bills. They are now widely understood to be a problem in need of a regulatory solution. The emergence of the especially egregious charges by air ambulances is a stark indication that policymakers have not yet solved this pervasive problem. Air ambulances illustrate that the harm from surprise bills is not just high prices secretly charged to vulnerable patients. Prices are important for consumers, but they are also vitally important signals in a market, and economic harm results when charges cannot be readily compared to market prices. When market prices are absent or hidden, providers can charge whatever they want, and private equity follows the lucrative opportunity. (Kevin Schulman, Barak Richman and Arnold Milstein, 1/8)

There’s been an increase in public outrage over balance or “surprise” billing. As physicians, we agree and share in our patients’ concerns. And, we’re fighting to change the system. (Mark B. Monahan, 1/7)

A federal requirement meant to provide patients with more information about the cost of their health care has forced hospitals to post online their prices for everything from acetaminophen tablets to zoledronic acid. It also has prompted the sort of response that is not unique to the health care industry. In a nutshell, it involves talking down to the little people. (Theodore Decker, 1/8)

According to data that Apple submitted in its petition asking the Food and Drug Administration to give clearance to the heart monitoring app, the app accurately detects atrial fibrillation 99 percent of the time it gets a good reading.Related: The next Apple Watch wants to monitor your heart. Should you let it? That sounds amazing. But it leaves out an important little something: the likelihood of having atrial fibrillation is low among younger individuals and increases with age. I did some calculations to answer the question, “If my watch tells me I have atrial fibrillation, what are the odds it is correct?” The answer depends on the watch wearer’s age. (Daniel Yazdi, 1/8)

In the video above, Anne Bynum describes the harrowing experience of being criminalized and incarcerated after having a stillbirth.Ms. Bynum is one of several hundred women in the United States who have been prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes. Numerous states across the country have passed laws recognizing fetuses — even fertilized eggs — as persons separate from the mother, and more are considering doing so. These laws have had the perverse consequence of not just pitting the health of a fetus against that of a pregnant woman but of also, in some cases, overriding the woman’s rights entirely. (12/28)

Despite the need to spend more time with my patients, insurance is reimbursing for shorter visits, while the amount of time I spend documenting has increased. This is far from ideal. In fact, a recent study showed that family doctors spend almost an hour and a half of “pajama-time” nightly on documentation. This leads directly to physician burnout. According to a 2017 National Academy of Medicine paper, more than half of U.S. physicians are experiencing substantial symptoms of burnout including emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and a low sense of personal accomplishment. (Marc Siegel, 1/7)

The vaping epidemic arose so quickly that nobody knows how to help the addicted teenagers. Existing methods to help adults quit smoking often don’t work with vaping, and most of the medications have not been tested for teenagers. Research into how to help teens could take years, so the FDA is right to try to get things started. Meanwhile, it should get tougher on marketing and sales to teenagers, and local authorities should make sure those laws are enforced. (1/4)

At the end of the day, we measure public health effectiveness through two important measures: life expectancy and infant/maternal health. While we have made significant strides in both over the last century, there remains much work to do. (Tim Ingram, 1/7)

City officials sparked controversy late last year, extending the tobacco ban from mental health facilities (enacted in 2016) to include city-funded inpatient substance use disorder (SUD) programs. Citing overall health concerns and the risk to sustaining abstinence-based recovery, the bold move hopes to reduce negative impacts of concurrent tobacco and substance use, which include elevated risks of cancer, to cognitive functioning, and of all-cause mortality. (Robert Ashford, 1/7)

Soon Ohio will have a new governor and a new opportunity to clean Ohio’s streams. Immediate actions are needed by Gov.--elect Mike DeWine to halt environmental degradation and to restore the EPA’s effectiveness and pride. This can be accomplished only by installing a leadership team at the Ohio EPA that eliminates the atmosphere of fear and paranoia, respects scientists and engineers and creates a work environment that makes staff members feel that they are valued. (George Elmaraghy, 1/8)